A blog about media and technology. Sorry, no cat GIFs.

Monthly Archives: November 2016

I’m a fan of social media as a way to keep in touch with friends and reach out to strangers to communicate. It’s also a good way to drive traffic to readingeagle.com. Sometime you gotta go where the people are, right?

But I have a big problem with the way that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, dominates the online space in such a way that it becomes an echo chamber for like-minded people who only seek out information with their point of view. That was the problem this election cycle, but as I wrote in my most recent column, it’s a problem inherent to Facebook. It won’t go away just because the election is over.

Yes, we humans are part of the problem. We let it happen, and it’s unlikely we will change.

Social media … uses algorithms to encourage comfort and complaisance, since its entire business model is built upon maximizing the time users spend inside of it. Who would like to hang around in a place where everyone seems to be negative, mean, and disapproving? The outcome is a proliferation of emotions, a radicalization of those emotions, and a fragmented society. This is way more dangerous for the idea of democracy founded on the notion of informed participation.

Derakhshan spent six years in an Iranian prison, during which time the world moved on from blogs and on to social media. So he has a distinct ability to remember what the internet was like before Facebook’s conquest and compare it to the online world we’re in today.

We would be wise to heed his warnings. If you haven’t read his MIT piece, click the link above. I also recommend “The Web We Have to Save,” which you can find here.

How to lose a job in 1 day

A tech CEO went on a Facebook tirade on Election Night after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win the presidency. Matt Harrigan, now an ex-CEO, was not happy. He threatened to kill Trump in terms that were pretty unambiguous.

“I’m going to kill the President Elect. Bring it secret service.”

Though his post was on a private page, it went viral anyway. See? Never assume your social posts can’t be seen by everyone on the internet. Harrigan apologized for his tirade but he’s now on paid leave from the company he founded in 2013.

Racism isn’t dead

The Obamas are moving out of the White House, but some in our country are hardly moving on from the racist attitudes that have been a stain on the Republic for centuries. After a woman in West Virginia posted a photo to Facebook calling first lady Michelle Obama an ape, the mayor of Clay, W.Va., praised the image in a comment. Beverly Whaling was criticized and, on Tuesday, resigned her post, leaving three years left in her term.

Speech is still free

A high school student in Ohio wanted to expose a schoolmate’s racism, so she reposted said schoolmate’s racist remarks on Snapchat. Then she and another girl got suspended, accused of “being disruptive” for reposting the comments. But the American Civil Liberties Union got involved and asked school officials to cancel their punishment of one-day suspension. The school did so for one of the girls. The other one had already served her suspension.

Now that the presidential election is over, the inevitable post-game speculation of What It All Means has gone full-throttle. Part of that discussion includes the abundance of fake news on social media that may or may not have contributed to Donald Trump’s success.

I’m not sure that it did, absent any reliable exit polls showing a large number of voters who say they couldn’t vote for Hillary because she wouldn’t show them how to get six-pack abs using one weird trick. But I am glad that we are finally talking about Facebook’s big problem: The easy sharing of fake news.

Abraham Lincoln said a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth laces up its Air Jordans. He didn’t really, but the point still stands: Fiction can spread faster than fact. And when you have a platform like Facebook, where people see a steady stream of selfies, status updates and links to stories — all of which they assume to be true — it’s no wonder a cottage industry of peddling fake news has emerged. Emily Bell, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, nails the problem:

Like Gresham’s Law in economics, which states that “bad money drives out good,” in a competitive information and entertainment economy, the quality of journalism (or even the veracity of information) does not guarantee financial success. Fake news and real news are not different types of news; they are completely different categories of activity. But in Facebook’s News Feed, they look the same.

This has been a problem I have been writing about for a long time, as recently as June when I said that fake news is one of the threats to journalism as we know it. But it gets tiresome banging the “don’t-believe-everything-you-see-on-Facebook” drum, and I’m far from the only one doing it.